I'm reading the above at the moment and reached this passage. For those that don't know the book it's set in a post-apocolyptic USA, hence the reference to blocked roads. Bear in mind the Judge starts out heading East from Boulder:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stephen King, The Stand

The Judge did not head toward Denver. When he reached Route 36, he proceeded directly across it and out along Route 7. The morning sun was bright and mellow, and on this secondary route, there was not enough stalled traffic to block the road. The town of Brighton was worse; at one point he had to leave the highway and drive across the local high school football field to avoid a colossal traffic jam. He continued east until he reached I-25. A right turn here would have taken him into Denver. Instead he turned left –north –and nosed onto the feeder ramp. Halfway down he put the transmission in neutral and looked left again, west, to where the Rockies rose serenely into the blue sky with Boulder lying at their base ... He would follow I-25 to Cheyenne..."

In order to understand the geography of the below passage, I looked at Google Maps. I don't get it. It seems to me that if you head East from Boulder on Route 7, you would go over Route 36, then reach I-25 and go north before you reach Brighton.

Am I making some fundamental error, or has the area changed (perhaps some freeways being re-numbered since King wrote the book in 1978?) or has he made an error?

[As a side note, immediately, ie within probably 60 seconds, of posting this I thought that really I should have googled, since maybe this is a well known error. So I googled. This very thread was already the number 1 ranked search result. How the hell does google do that so fast?]

Yes, he probably meant Broomfield, not Brighton. You will hit 1-25 before you get to Brighton. (With the understanding that I actually have no idea where the city limits of Brighton are. I know where downtown Brighton is.)

I see what you mean about Broomfield although looking on google it seems (in the area of Route 7) to be more just a district than a town. And the housing areas of Broomfield in that area look very modern (ie post 1978?). They don't look like a "town" with a high school.

[As a side note, immediately, ie within probably 60 seconds, of posting this I thought that really I should have googled, since maybe this is a well known error. So I googled. This very thread was already the number 1 ranked search result. How the hell does google do that so fast?]

King can be a little loose with details. He's written some hilariously bad passages about car technology, for example.

You didn't like how his Buick 8 worked?

Or maybe didn't you like the Takuro Spirit.

King's been using the concept of multiple, slightly varied worlds (all variants of the keystone world as noted above) for decades. No great leap to making the story's geography different from reality. He did it in "The Black House" where he played fast and loose quite deliberately with Coulee Country landscape. No reason for me to think he didn't do the same in Colorado.

I'm thinking a little more of Christine, where the high school kids gather around to see "the gleaming pistons socketed in their valves" and he has only a vague notion of how an odometer works. There were other flubs that (to me) obviously came from Researching Something He Didn't Know Much About. You know the syndrome, where sometimes you can spot the page of the standard reference the writer is quoting.

I'm thinking a little more of Christine, where the high school kids gather around to see "the gleaming pistons socketed in their valves" and he has only a vague notion of how an odometer works. There were other flubs that (to me) obviously came from Researching Something He Didn't Know Much About. You know the syndrome, where sometimes you can spot the page of the standard reference the writer is quoting.

I can't get past characters in a town near Pittsburgh talking about watching the Phillies on TV.

The vignettes portion of The Stand has a bit about a woman finding some bullets and they're "mossy green" but she assumes they're still good because bullets don't spoil. Then she fires the gun and it explodes and kills her. At the time, I just took it on faith but now I'm assuming that's all kind of bullshit? Am I right? Wrong? What would make a bullet do that? Verdigris on the casing?

I can't get past characters in a town near Pittsburgh talking about watching the Phillies on TV.

The realities of such things can be funnier, such as right now, where a Russian spy ship is being described as "30 miles off the Connecticut coast." Now, that gets the point across as the target is likely the sub base at Groton/New London, but if you're thirty miles out from there, you're swimming distance to either Long Island or Cape Cod.

(The Connecticut shore is almost entirely facing Long Island Sound, which is only about 15 miles across. Thirty miles out is the Atlantic side of LI...)

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